Dude what you need in your life is something like malo. It allows the simplicity and elegance of the nested tables paradigm but with out the cruft of using tables! http://code.google.com/p/malo/
Personally I have an abstraction layer which allows me to express my layouts as s-expressions and then be rendered either as "html" (tables, great for quick development) and then rendered to "xhtml" (divs + css) for when I am polishing things up.
Right now it is written in php (yes the s-expression reader and everything, and yes it caches the interpreted files so the overhead is worth it) and I plan on releasing it on googlecode when I am happy with the "interface" of required methods for each "layout adapter".
edit: I forgot to mention malo is like 9 lines of css w/out comments.
Thanks for the pointer to Malo. I have looked at 960.gs and Blueprint as well before I decided to use use CSS Reset and then my own layout using the same technique as 960.gs
After going through blueprint and 960.gs, I settled on malo as well. It's dead simple, light, stable, and can be learned in 2 minutes.
Its only gotcha is to adjust the negative margin value for IE6 if you change your default font-size. You can also add your own partitioning percentages. Lastly, the standard triggering of "hasLayout" for floats in IE applies.
Personally I have an abstraction layer which allows me to express my layouts as s-expressions and then be rendered either as "html" (tables, great for quick development) and then rendered to "xhtml" (divs + css) for when I am polishing things up.
Right now it is written in php (yes the s-expression reader and everything, and yes it caches the interpreted files so the overhead is worth it) and I plan on releasing it on googlecode when I am happy with the "interface" of required methods for each "layout adapter".
edit: I forgot to mention malo is like 9 lines of css w/out comments.